YouChat is Like ChatGPT with Real-time Search Built In
It can even present reference sources
Just in case you thought ChatGPT would run away with the large language model (LLM) market and Google would be the last search engine you ever use, You.com decided to shake up our expectations and learned behaviors
TLDR;
You.com has a new chat-based search product based on a large language model. It can perform many of the same tasks as ChatGPT. It can answer questions, write a poem, produce a persuasive essay, and write ad copy.
YouChat can also tell you about current events and the sources it uses in formulating answers. ChatGPT cannot.
YouChat’s conversational search feature is strong and provides well-articulated responses. It does not always return sources for the information presented but sometimes does and will reliably include it in the answer if you explicitly ask it to.
The NLU performs well, but YouChat will often lose conversational context after a few turns if you continue to use indefinite identifiers and particularly if you change subjects.
It does return incorrect information sometimes. One query response said that Jack Dorey was Twitter’s current CEO. Interestingly when I shifted the same question to the You.com search product, it produced the correct result in both the main search panel and in the companion YouChat. With that said, the responses appear to be correct most of the time.
OpenAI has a significant new competitor vying for LLM market share and mindshare. I have used InstructGPT and ChatGPT for search many times, but the lack of source references and recent information are significant drawbacks. In addition, You.com has several other features that compete directly with OpenAI’s broader GPT-3 use cases.
But the real target benchmark here is Google. A conversational system like YouChat has some significant advantages over traditional searfch. It can synthesize data from multiple web pages and websites to provide a more robust response. It also answers the question directly as opposed to reverting to producing a list of links. And it can enable users to narrow or redirect their search through a conversational interaction model without having to start over.
The result? YouChat, for now, is my first stop for search. Google is the backup. 🙂
The Season of LLMs
Everyone was enthralled with ChatGPT when it arrived 27 days ago. This was particularly true in the conversational AI industry. ChatGPT’s erudite responses to queries and conversational interactions were appreciated by professionals that designed human-to-bot conversations for a living. The more technical people in the industry recognized the innovation behind the highly accurate natural language understanding (NLU) and the ability to maintain conversational context.
While the creative skills of ChatGPT, which range from storytelling and poetry to impromptu game design, were intriguing improvements over legacy GPT-3, it seemed that most people landed on the same idea about the technology’s immediate value. ChatGPT could revolutionize search. Except, it can’t, yet. Why? Recency and sourcing are not available.
ChatGPT today doesn’t know anything that transpired after September 2021. That is the last time it was trained, and it has no real-time connection to the internet. If you are researching a topic that is not tied to current events and the information doesn’t change very often, you may be okay. However, the ChatGPT dataset is now 15 months old. That’s an eternity in our era.
An even bigger drawback is that ChatGPT cannot tell you where it sourced the information it returned to answer your query. This is problematic whether you are dealing with current events or something from antiquity. ChatGPT comes with a big disclaimer on the application’s front page: “May occasionally generate incorrect information.”
I can attest that it does return falsehoods. Just yesterday, I was using the GPT-3 feature in D-ID’s AI video generator to answer a question about Shakespeare’s relevance to modern society. The answer overall was reasonable, but there were factual errors about how Shakespeare’s famous star-crossed lovers perished. This topic is non-fiction, not recent, and there is no contention over the plot element. And yet, the answer was wrong and undermined the quality of the response.
Granted, my experience is that ChatGPT is correct most of the time. The fact that it is wrong sometimes means that I need to assess the content for accuracy every time. That can be difficult for some topics where the source is not cited. I even had to abandon one line of research in ChatGPT because I could not verify the sources and, therefore, could not use the data in its response.
YouChat also has a disclaimer that says, “This product is in beta, and its accuracy may be limited. You.com is not liable for content generated.” However, it does have a live connection to the internet so that you can get access to the latest data on the web. And, to my wonderment, it also can tell you where it sourced its answers from. Bravo!!!
The Source Matters
YouChat appears to provide the best of both worlds by producing answers in a concise written statement that integrates information from multiple sources and lists the sources. You have seen something similar to this before. Google’s Answer Box provides a short answer to your question sourced directly from a specific webpage and includes a link to that page. YouChat takes this to another level.
Granted, YouChat does make mistakes. When I asked about the CEO of Twitter, it responded with Jack Dorsey and no source. I then reverted to the You.com search product, and it produced the correct result both in the main search panel and in the YouChat companion.
You will notice that the YouChat response in the upper right also provided a link to the source for the response. Search also displayed an incorrect result citing a former CEO as its second response option. This suggests there is sometimes conflict between what YouChat thinks is the answer and You.com search. It is a beta product with limited access right now, so you might expect a few bugs. This will be worth following. The key is that the source is identified, which makes the verification easier.
For now, I am stopping first at You.com/YouChat for search with Google as a backup. I still may query ChatGPT, but not for information that is new or requires verification. And I will be doing a verification step against my searches through YouChat. I expect this to save me time and generate better results.
The LLM Wars
The LLM Wars have begun. OpenAI has an early lead. AI21 is out there with another option for users. You.com’s YouChat is now a contender for several top LLM use cases. Google’s AI group and DeepMind both have LLMs, as do Nvidia, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon. 2023 is going to be interesting as some of the tech giants shift out of closed beta to general availability. The competition is going to be wild. One thing we know for sure. It will be a war of words.
H/t to Michal Stanlislawek for bringing this holiday weekend announcement to my attention.
